Congratulations to Katherine Stevenson, leader of the Transforming Course Design project for Math 103 ( Mathematical Methods for Business), who received a CSU Northridge 2008 Honored Faculty Award for Distinguished Teaching. Kate recently reported outstanding final exam results from the project: "Our average score across 12 sections of math 103 on the common final was 70%. There were 428 students taking the exam, and it was commonly graded on Saturday May 10th. The average this term represents a more than a 20 point improvement over last term. The exams over the last three terms have been similar, but of course not identical. However, even assuming the usual variations on exam difficulty, instructors, and spring/fall student differences, this is a significant improvement." You can learn more about the methods used in the course redesign in the podcast on the left side of this page.

Our team members attending the national Redesign Alliance conference in March concluded that many CSU institutions have already implemented the cost reduction strategies used in Course Redesigns led by the National Center for Academic Transformation. (At some campuses, it did appear that the

A joint project team from the CSUMB Library and the School of Information Technology and Communication Design will be developing a course redesign for CST 101, a course in technology and information literacy. The team plans to reduce sections of CST 101 from

The two multi-campus teams in Transforming Course Design - Developmental Math and General Chemistry, are identifying a variety of approaches to improving learning outcomes for students. One method identified

Sacramento State's new campus project in Transforming Course Design will be running a pilot test in Fall 2008. The project is a partnership between the Economics Department, the Learning Skills Center and the office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies. They will run two sections of Intro

The CSU is involved in a project – the Information/ICT Literacy Digital Learning Objects Initiative - to develop a repository of information literacy digital learning objects and other tutorials that can be used in your courses to improve student learning. Digital learning objects are web-based, interactive, self-contained, reusable learning materials used to support a specific learning objective. In order to provide the most appropriate digital learning materials, we would appreciate your taking a few minutes to give us your expert insight into the information literacy, or research, needs of your students and what. The survey takes no more than 6 minutes to complete. Simply click on this URL: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=XGOX6wiD7E8UXQXR9c_2bTwQ_3d_3d We would appreciate your response to the survey no later than April 18, 2008. If you have any questions, please contact Stephanie Brasley, CSU Manager, Information Literacy Initiatives, 562-951-4372 or sbrasley@calstate.edu. Thank you.

The SDSU Course Design Institute has extended into the virtual realm. The program's blog is becoming the program's virtual hub to Faculty Fellow Portfolios, a YouTube Channel and conversations about Course Design. Now in it's 2nd year, the CDI has evolved from the successful faculty development program pICT, funded by the Qualcomm Institute for Innovation and Educational Success.

The Transforming Course Design teams in General Chemistry and Developmental Mathematics are using customized workspaces within Google Groups to support their work. Team members manage their individual tasks and interact with their team colleagues on Project workpages, and the Chancellor's Office support team is using Guide workpages to document the evolving process for collaboration across multiple campuses. There are 12 campuses working together in Developmental Math to create redesigned course formats, learning activities and resources for re-use and adaptation across the CSU, and 10 campuses working together in General Chemistry. You can click here to get a roadmap of the collaboration workspaces .

The Learning Stories Luncheon series is part of their Course Design Institute. It's a vehicle come together, hear from Faculty Fellows and have a conversation about course (re)design. To participate in the conversation online, go to the CDI blog at http://sdsu-pict-cdi.org Presenters

Project leader Lori Townsend met with the Human Development department at the beginning of the Fall Quarter to discuss the goals for the project. She then met individually with department faculty in order to gain a better understanding of the teaching methods used in both online and in-person courses within the department. She also worked with the incoming online major cohort of adult students during their orientation to the campus. After these meetings, it became clear that students would need to focus on more than the upper-division Information Literacy objectives, but would also needa refresher on lower division IL objectives as well. The Human

One month into the new term, I have good news: The hybrid math 103L's are a hit. We have 4 GA's running 14 sections of the lab covering the 11 sections of math 103 (two are large with 100-120 students). Students who do not pass the MPT are required to take the lab. The in-class portion meets for one hour each week and the students work in groups on a prescribed list of practice problems. These problems were taken from a long list of exam problems compiled last term. The students are facilitated in their group work by their GA and by one undergraduate student. The undergrad lab assistants (paid for this term by our Provost) are business majors who did exceptionally well on the math 103 final last term. These student assistants are much more helpful than I had expected and the students love them. The attitude in the lab is very positive. In addition to the GA and the undergraduate assistant, each lab section has been "adopted" by a math 103 instructor. The instructors hold one of their

The goal of CSUSB's Transforming Course Design project is to restructure the Gateway Program, our First-Year Experience project, in ways that implement cost-saving measures that will promote sustainability

The STAM:PEDE program at Sonoma State is developing new course designs and multimedia resources in four course areas: First Year Experience Seminar, Philosophy 101, Information Literacy, and Nursing. The projects initially focused on Threshold Concepts. Online Units of Instruction were then

Project co-Leader Eric Hsu reports that several other CSU campuses have been interacting with the SFSU team, including Joanne Becker (San Jose State), Brigitte Lahme (Sonoma State) and Bill Fisher (Chico). Two sections of the transformed SFSU Calculus course will be offered in Fall 2008, in blended sections on Tuesday and Thursday. More details are available in the Interim Project report posted on the SFSU project site, and in the video introduction on both the project site and our CSU Transforming Course Design program site.

Tom and I have thought a lot about this space, community, website, how we make it something CDI teams want to participate in, post, comment on and find out more. This article: Ten Common Objections to Social Media Adoption and How You Can Respond Do any of these sound familiar? I suffer from information overload already. I don't have the time to contribute and moderate, it looks like it takes a lot of time and energy. There are so many tools that are similar, I can't tell where to invest my time so I don't use any of it at all. RSS, the backbone of the social web are amazingly underutilized. A colleague recently tweeted, "The idea that you make

A number of the resources produced by the Open Learning Initiative are relevant to projects in Transforming Course Design. This project at Carnegie Mellon University is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation Open Educational Resources program. The CMU team has integrated theory from cognitive sciences with multimedia resources to engage active learning and target specific learning challenges for students. CSU faculty using the OLI Statistics modules recently met with the CMU team to provide feedback on their experiences. Mark Schilling from CSUN and David Meredith from SFSU, along with Caren McClure from Rancho Santiago Community College, met with CMU course developers,

On January 9, Associate Vice-Chancellor Keith Boyum announced the selection of Development Mathematics and General Chemistry as the initial target areas for CSU multi-campus collaborations in Transforming Course Design. Provosts are nominating faculty candidates for the following roles in these two projects: Design Team

Transforming Course Design of CST 101 Tech Tools at CSUMB. The two project leaders, Mardi Chalmers and George Station, have created the structure of the redesign. CSUMB librarians and ITCD faculty will be developing the curriculum, using new pedagogies learned through professional development workshops. We will develop, borrow, or modify existing online learning modules for all nuts and bolts aspects of information and technology literacy. Read more on our site.

Our Transforming Course Design Project is moving forward almost exactly as planned. This update covers four areas of change: the development of an online resource shared by all sections of our first-year seminar, UNIV 101; the delivery of multiple training workshops to assist instructors and Peer Mentors in the use of technologies required by the redesigned course (the online Vista classroom; the newly introduced clickers; the combined google pages and PhotoShop Elements program used to construct digital portfolios); the construction of a community Vista space for instructors; the convening of multiple student focus groups for vision conversations around issues of technology that affect students’ adaptation to college life. Read more at our project blog (also accessible from the campus project listings on the Home page).

With our seed grant, we have been examining the needs for and development of tutorials, self-assessment tools, and other online learning objects that could facilitate faculty instruction in classes that focus on student research and presentation skills... At CSUDH, we have consulted with the History Dept and the Chicano Studies Dept., both of whom have active senior seminars, and encourage students to present their work at conferences. Across campuses, Mardi Chalmers and George Station at CSUMB have been very helpful in sharing their ideas for course redesign for the architecture of a computer class called Tech Tools. Read more at the project blog (also accessible from the campus project listings on the Home page).

We are making the project report template available for you here. Select, copy and paste and customize the text below. Paste it where? If you have a project site with us, it goes under the Interim Report link we have provided. If you are managing your own project site, you will want to have a page for your Interim Report.

This is an interesting article in the Washington Post: Colleges Cope With Bigger Classes. The majority of our (SDSU) course designs deal with big (500) classes. According to Carol Twigg, in a traditional course the faculty are doing all the work and the students are watching while in a redesigned course, students are doing the work and faculty are stepping in as needed.

The SDSU Course Design Institute (CDI) Team met with Associate Deans for a Question and Answer Luncheon on the CDI. The goals of the luncheon were to begin opening up institutional conversations about course design, to inform the Colleges of the services and successes of the CDI, and to begin directly involving the Colleges in the selection and support of 2008 CDI Fellows.

In parallel with the main Fall 2007 initiative on multi-campus collaborations described in the previous post, Provosts at the campuses not yet supported for a campus-based project will be invited to submit a proposal to launch a local initiative to develop their campus capability in Transforming Course Design...

A Science faculty member in one of our Transforming Course Design workshops raised this issue about preparing students for new approaches to teaching and learning (not unique to Transforming Course Design)

The National Center for Academic Transformation, led by Carol Twigg, has been a pioneer in Course Redesign. In our CSU Transforming Course Design program we are building on the work of NCAT and other sources: see our upcoming January Update for a list of sources as a step-by-guide to opportunities for transforming our courses. If your work falls within the guidelines of the current NCAT program outlined below, you can get some valuable help and liaise with discipline colleagues in other regions who are pursuing similar goals.

We've been beavering about on this Program site and the Campus sites and I'm happy to say we've made some wonderful progress. We're still working on a few things, though, like getting multimedia embedded into pages and posts, finding and eliminating technical bugs and such. If you're new to participating in Web 2.0 aka the social web, WELCOME! You can find comfort in knowing we're about connecting sharing and living this program, typos, bugs and all! Stop here weekly for SignsOfLife. Stop here for the officially official news about TCD from the Chancellor's Office.

Engaging teams of faculty and department leaders to ensure sustainable course enhancements, along with team members from academic support units; simultaneously addressing quality of learning outcomes, student success, and costs of instruction; applying scholarly knowledge and exemplary resources from research in teaching and learning; emphasizing assessment of student learning outcomes and sharing of exemplary practices.